Stafford Beer coined the term viable systems in the 1950s, and developed it within his management cybernetics theories.
He designed his viable system model as a diagnostic tool for organisational pathologies (conditions of social ill-health).
This not only embraces the ideas of autopoiesis (self-production), but also autogenesis (self-creation) which responds to a proposition that living systems also need to learn to maintain their viability.
[2] AAT is a generic modelling approach that has the capacity to anticipate future potentials for behaviour.
Superstructural theory may include attributes of collective identity, cognition, emotion, personality; purpose and intention; self-reference, self-awareness, self-reflection, self-regulation and self-organisation.
The function of this couple is to manifest figurative attributes of the personality, like goals or ideology, operatively consequently influencing behaviour.
Unlike other trait theories of personality, this adopts epistemic traits[13] that centres on values, an approach that tends to be more stable (since basic values tend to be stable) in terms of personality testing and retesting, than other approaches that use (for instance) agency preferences (like Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) that may change between test and retest.
[15] The cognitive process by which personality is represented through epistemic trait functions (called types), can be explained through both instrumental and epistemic rationality,[citation needed] where instrumental rationality (also referred to as utilitarian,[16] and related to the expectations about the behaviour of other human beings or objects in the environment given some cognitive basis for those expectation) is independent of, if constrained by, epistemic rationality (related to the formation of beliefs in an unbiased manner, normally set in terms of believable propositions: due to their being strongly supported by evidence, as opposed to being agnostic towards propositions that are unsupported by "sufficient" evidence, whatever this means).
Applications of CAT could be found in social, political and economic sciences, for instance, recent studies analyzed Donald Trump and Theresa May's personalities.
In contrast, extending the principles of autonomous agency theory, a generic model has been formulated for the generation of higher cybernetic orders,[19] developed using the concepts of recursion and incursion as proposed by Dubois.
[20][21] The model is reflective, for instance, of processes of knowledge creation for community learning[22] and symbolic convergence theory.